Essay On The Narrator's Madness In The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins uses insanity to portray the mistreatment of women and how the solutions people thought worked back then only made them worse. A Rose For Emily by William Faulkner brings up insanity as negative response to what society thinks or says about a certain person. The gossips and the rejection of Homer only made her commit murder. Readers can learn from this short stories to not be so judgmental against women, or believe in stereotypes that society portray.

The short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a brilliant piece of fictional literature. The tale involves a mentally ill woman who is kept in a hideous, yellow room under the orders of her husband, John, who is a physician. The ill woman is conflicted due to the fact that the horrifying yellow wallpaper in the room is trapping a woman who she must help escape, but the sick woman is aware that she must get better in order to leave the terrifying, yellow room. The setting and personification applied in the short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, allows readers to develop an understanding of the sickness of the main character faces.

Due to the famous rest treatment in which the narrator is told to follow, her interactions with other individuals is severely limited. Most of her social interactions are between her and her husband John. The narrator’s relationship with her husband is considered to

The Struggle of Many Women The story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, reflects the life of many women during the difficult times they were living in. The narrator can relate to many people during the Victorian age where the woman’s role was to be a wife and a mother only. The narrator is a woman who is imaginative and is dissociated from herself and from the world.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator is treated for depression by “rest cure,” isolation from society, which affects her mentality causing her to become secretive, withdrawn, and insane. With the treatment

She proceeds to explain the contributing factors of the narrator succumbing to her “disease” of hysteria which was isolation from social interaction and the restriction of her own thoughts. She points out that the narrator is confined to a simple square room with nothing to offer in terms of mental health therapy. The narrator’s lack of the ability to interact with anything or anyone leads to infatuation with the wallpaper, which turns out to be “the

Essentially, it is the physical and subsequent metaphorical entrapment of the female protagonist by her husband in The Yellow Wallpaper that leads to a loss of her identity. In addition to physical descriptions, a sense of identity can be established through the delivery of relationships with others, and moral beliefs. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the interplay of characters plays a key role in defining the narrator’s identity through the imbalance of power in her marriage with John. Gilman arguably presents the narrator’s descent into madness through her inability to create a new identity counter to John’s entrapment of her.

Awesome Title in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” by Adrienne Rich The feminist movement has grown and spread in the past decade. Women all over the world are standing up for basic rights, such as education, that all people, regardless of gender can enjoy. This movement is not a new one, though. Women from times past had already started paving the way towards some of the rights women have today.

How she describes her surroundings and her interactions with her family evolves as her condition worsens. By the end, the reader can truly see just how far gone the narrator has gone. The narrator’s fixation on the yellow wallpaper had gone from a slight obsession to full mental breakdown. As it is with most good stories, the presence of strong symbolism and detailed settings is a very important aspect of the story that helps to draw the reader into the story.

The reader of this story can tell this woman is not only suffering from insanity, but also loneliness. She often finds herself crying and says, “I cry at nothing, and I cry most of the time.” She attempts to tell her husband how she is feeling but she is unable to, she says “I was crying before I had finished.” (681) the reader can see how this woman is upset and it is not only due to her illness. Infect, the woman makes many comments about how her husband is not reassuring.

What exactly defines one as “insane” versus “sane”, and where is the boundary between the two? Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” explores exactly that: the short story initially seems to be a tale of a 19th century woman forced into the notorious rest cure popularized at the time by male doctors--however, as the plot progresses, it becomes a much deeper commentary not only on societal limitations imposed on women, but also on the blurred line separating sanity from insanity. Gilman explores the boundary between sanity and insanity with the usage of different literary elements; she expresses how the boundary is “paper-thin” through the usage of symbolism, shows the subtle conversion to insanity by utilizing a stream of consciousness

The woman was obsessed with the wallpaper she begins to hallucinate that something was creeping on her. She had locked herself in the room and would not let anyone in the bedroom with her because she was trying to trap the creeper that she thought she saw. The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” say,“‘Open the door, my darling!’ , ‘I can’t,’ said I. ‘ The key is down by the front door under a plantain leaf’”

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator is suffering from postpartum depression. The narrator 's husband John, who also happens to be her physician, prescribes the rest cure to help lift his wife of her depressive state and ultimately heal her depression. However, the rest cure does not allow the narrator to experience any mental stimulation. Therefore, to manage her boredom the narrator begins obsessing over the pattern of the yellow wallpaper. After analyzing the pattern for awhile, the narrator witnesses a woman trapped behind bars.

In her childhood, the unnamed narrator has had a wild imagination which still haunts her: she admits "I do not sleep," and as a result she becomes restless.(653). Her imagination makes her live in an imagined world of her own and completely detached from reality. The

Enclosed to the four wall of this “big” room, the narrator says “the paint and paper look as if a boy’s school had used it” because “it is stripped off” indicating that males have attempted to distort women’s truth but somehow did not accomplish distorting the entire truth (Perkins Gilman, 43). When the narrator finally looked at the wall and the paint and paper on it, she was disgusted at the sight. The yellow wallpaper, she penned, secretly against the will of men, committed artistic sin and had lame uncertain curves that suddenly committed suicide when you followed them for a little distance. The narrator is forced to express her discomfort with the image to her husband, he sees it as an “excited fancy” that is provoked by the “imaginative power and habit of story making” by “a nervous weakness” like hers (Perkins Gilman, 46). Essentially, he believes that her sickness is worsening and the depth of her disease is the cause of the unexpected paranoia.